This afternoon Gigabyte published an album of pictures entitled 'New Intel Chipset Motherboards' via Facebook. While it didn't disclose the chipsets these boards are equipped with, blurring out the important letter/numeral from the names, the Gigabyte Photoshop jockey forgot to blur the Web2.0 style reflection which clearly shows the number nine upside down and inverted…
Looking though the pictures we can clearly see the following motherboards – let's just assume the blurred out number is a '9' to simplify things:
Gigabyte Z97X-UD5H-BK
The UD stands for Ultra Durable and BK marks this motherboard out as a 'Black Edition'. This is undoubtedly an overclocking friendly motherboard meant to be put to work alongside a new Intel processor such as the unlocked Devil's Canyon. You can also clearly see that this motherboard is SLI and CrossFire capable.
Gigabyte Z97X-SOC Force
This is again an overclocking motherboard, made even clearer by the box. The features on the board look pretty similar to what are offered on the Black Edition above. However the orange highlights on this model clearly show it has an extra PCI-Express 3.0 slot suitable for graphics cards. The SOC denotes a 'Super Over Clock' motherboard.
Gigabyte Z97X-UD7 TH
This motherboard's main distinguishing factor is denoted by its TH name suffix which stands for Thunderbolt 2. You can clearly see the ports and connections on this board as Gigabyte has been kind enough to provide a close-up of this board on its own (below). If Thunderbolt 2 connectivity is something you wish to utilise then this might be a board to keep your eye on.
MSI – reminds us of its leaked motherboard images
Just before Easter weekend we saw a whole range of MSI made Intel 9-Series chipset equipped Gaming Series motherboards and their packaging, courtesy of a leak via WCCF-Tech. These sported many trademark MSI features such as Audio Boost 2, Killer LAN, USB Audio Power and so on alongside the support for the newest Haswell refresh processors and M.2 PCI-e storage. Now MSI has followed Gigabytes lead and actually published a picture of an upcoming motherboard and packaging on its Facebook page.
